Category Archives: Beauty

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It’s an explosion of flowering trees, wisteria, and azaleas. The biological imperative to reproduce is on full display: one of my daughter’s professors calls this “plant mating season”. The trees are outdoing each other for attention. The rest of us are VIP guests at Plant World Fashion Week.

Of course there’s pollen, tons of it. Everything that isn’t covered with flowers is buried in yellow dust. And nobody can breathe.

But it’s worth it, especially if you have an 89-year-old mother with dementia. Because beauty never gets old. This time of year I don’t need to come up with any activities to do with her. All we have to do is go for a drive, and she’s happy.

The other day we went to one of our favorite spots, a small lake with a walking trail. We used to walk around it, but now we’re content to sit on one of the swings and take in the view. We become a cheering section for joggers, a welcoming committee for parents and toddlers, and a disappointment to the ducks, who were expecting snacks.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Mom’s dementia has forced me to slow down and notice all of this. It’s easy to take it for granted, or dismiss it as a nuisance — pollen season, ugh.

Driving through neighborhoods with her, walking oh-so-slowly to a park bench, sitting together without saying a word, I experience spring as a gift. Every flower on these stately trees is new life from very, very old life; life that will continue long after she and I are dead; life that will remind me of her when she’s gone. I can imagine myself in twenty years, on an spring day in Atlanta, sitting outside (on the same swing?) and remembering her. I can already picture the sunshine, the slight nip in the air, the blossoms on the trees, and the thought in my mind:

I’m back! I took some time off from blogging, but I’m ready to return to the written word. For today, however, I’m sharing pictures. I got a new phone (smart phone with camera!) and a new camera (just a camera!), and I’ve enjoyed documenting my adventures, including a retreat about dementia and two delightful excursions with my daughter. So here, in no particular order, are images from a life that seems to be always in a state of metamorphosis . . .

In the novels of Jane Austen, well-to-do ladies periodically bring out a “workbasket” of fine linen to embroider or hem. It keeps their hands busy while they socialize, but it doesn’t put food on the table, so it doesn’t fit my definition of work, which is what you do to pay the bills. Right? I mean, how can delicate embroidery count as work?

The truth is, there’s no other “work” for Austen’s ladies to do. Even their wealthy husbands and suitors don’t have much to do except maintain their social standing; that’s exactly what Austen is satirizing. When I was growing up, more than a century after Austen, most women in my white, ranch-house-subdivision world still didn’t “work.” As more women entered the job market in the 1960s and 70s, a common question at cocktail parties was, “Do you work?” Stay-at-home moms rebelled: “Hell yes, we work!” Thus was born the more politically correct question, “Do you work outside the home?”, along with its corollary slogan, “Every mother is a working mother.” (How true.) But dishes and laundry and diaper changes are tasks that must be done over and over, leaving no permanent evidence of one’s labor.

My mom worked – inside and outside the home – for decades. She started working as a researcher in nuclear medicine straight out of college in 1948. By the time I was born she was teaching high school; after a brief hiatus during my nursery-school years, she went to work as a college math professor and never looked back. She loved it.

I was proud of my “working mother,” who earned a paycheck and helped struggling math students graduate from college. She still managed to bake cookies and sew Halloween costumes, but she put aside her needlepoint projects and fancy frills. I thought she was above all that crafty-stitchy nonsense. My mom was a professional. So I was shocked when, in retirement, Mom joined a quilting society and a chapter of the Embroidery Guild of America. What??

Suddenly I was being asked – forced – to reconsider my definition of work. Mom became an uber-volunteer, working for the food bank and Meals on Wheels, visiting nursing home residents long after her own mother had passed away, and sewing constantly. She belonged to a group called “Quilters for Others,” who made lapquilts for the elderly and blankets for the homeless. And she made the most exquisite pieces of needlework I have ever seen.

Needlework. Needle-work.

What was this tedious, mind-numbing hobby that was taking up so much of my mother’s time? How could she, who had raised me in chemistry labs and math classrooms, be content on the sofa with a piece of linen and a basket of fancy threads?

As it turned out, she was crafting much more than I knew. Like the best of Jane Austen’s characters, she was crafting relationships. Her “stitching buddies,” who met weekly to have lunch and work on projects together, became some of her closest friends. They went to classes and retreats together. They laughed at each other’s jokes and supported each other through challenging times: a husband’s cancer, a grandchild’s deployment to Iraq. All the while, they kept their needles busy.

And she was leaving a legacy. The fruits of my mother’s labor with a needle now hang on my walls. I marvel at the works of art she made for each of us. I’m already wondering which ones my daughter will want, and which will go to my niece and nephews, and whether they’ll want them now or later, when they’ve bought homes and settled down. These are tangible signs of a woman’s love for beauty, friendship, family, and community. They’re not her original designs, but they are her work, the work of her hands.

My mother taught me volumes about work. She changed my definition of the word. And she did it with nothing more than a needle and thread and a sewing basket.

Every week, WordPress issues a photo challenge. So far, I haven’t been ready to grab my camera and shoot pictures specifically for a post, but this week’s challenge reminded me of some photos I’ve been wanting to share.

The theme this week is “object”, and the challenge features a compelling picture by Cheri Lucas Rowlands. The object in the photo — a clear ball on a beach — is simple, but it grabs my attention and makes me want to step into the picture.

The obvious photo (but it still makes me happy)

The object of my recent photo shoot was a vase of flowers. (When I take my mother grocery shopping with me, she often insists on buying flowers for me and chocolate for herself, so we both win). I had these flowers on my dining room table and was struck by the way the afternoon light played with the glass, water, and clear marbles in the vase.

I’d been reading The Unforgettable Photograph by George Lange with Scott Mowbray. (This cool video will tell you what the book’s about.) I photographed the vase of flowers using the advice in Chapter 4: Move Your Eye. I love Lange’s exhortation:

“Keep moving until you find the place where, suddenly, you’re seeing things differently. Forget about what is right and be open to being seduced by what you might have thought was wrong. Always be hunting for a new angle.” (p. 60)

That’s what I tried to do with my vase of flowers. Here’s a sampling of what I got.

A bruised petal

Porch railings in light and shadow

Glass in water in glass

Lange’s book is for everyone, not just photo geeks. I highly recommend it. Who knows what you might capture, if you let yourself see things differently?

Autumn has been glorious in North Georgia, USA. We had an unusually rainy summer, and the old folks tell me that a damp summer brings a colorful fall. The leaves are vibrant yellow, deep red, burning orange. And we have a lot of them. Atlanta is a city in the trees; if you’ve ever changed planes at our airport, you’ve looked down on our forest of vegetation. I don’t know how they manage to fit the buildings in.

I lived in trees as a child. Not literally. I was just an avid tree climber. When my family moved to a house that had only tall pine trees, with limbs too high to reach, my dad hung a thick, knotted rope from the lowest branch so I could scramble up and disappear into the evergreen needles. I was six.

My husband and I bought our first house (our only house, so far) when I was thirty-five. One of the many things we loved about it was the yard full of hundred-year-old oak trees. Unfortunately, we soon fell into a multi-year drought that killed several of them, and despite the best efforts of a good arborist, we lost another to insects. As a result, we have fewer trees and a preponderance of dead wood, which the tree people cut into fireplace lengths and my husband splits with an ax.

We use it. One of the first things we did after we bought the house was have the previous owners’ gas logs removed from the fireplace. We may want that convenience later, but for now we love the crackle of a real wood fire. We heat water in a camp kettle for tea, and on rare occasions I make biscuits in a cast iron Dutch oven. (When our daughter was little and had friends over to play, one asked me, “Are you old-fashioned people?”)

Tonight I’m sitting by the fireplace, warming my toes and marveling at what the trees have given us: shade, beauty, color, heat, nourishment. And the cycle continues. I recently noticed that a weed I’ve long neglected in the garden is turning into a healthy little oak sapling. I thought about pulling it up, but I think I’ll leave it right where it is, and move the garden when the sapling gets tall enough to make shade.

I want there to be plenty of trees for the next generation to climb. They might be old-fashioned people too.

Actually, I live in an ordinary middle class neighborhood, but I like to think of it as a collection of artists’ studios, and I’m not exaggerating much. I’m an actor; my next-door neighbor is an artist and yoga instructor; another neighbor does graphic design, builds fine furniture and plays in a band; his wife is a retired ballerina . . . the list goes on.

My daughter’s spinning wheel

We also collect artist friends from other neighborhoods. Besides the usual suspects (my theater friends), we know dancers, musicians, glass blowers, and painters. My sixteen-year-old daughter has introduced me to the worlds of leather craft, blacksmithing, and fiber arts. (She is the proud owner of a spinning wheel. When she needs beautiful yarn, she rolls her own.)

So I should not have been surprised when one of our friends showed up at the door with a Ziploc bag and asked if she could harvest our lichen.

Lichen??

Paula is a brilliant hand-spinner and natural fiber artist who teaches workshops all over the country. She had spied lichen growing on our old wood pile by the driveway and broken off a few pieces to try in a dye mixture. She liked the results so much she wanted to make more batches, with different acid and base contents, just to see what she could create.

I was fascinated. Paula is the kind of person who comes up with a way to spin fiber from kudzu, which ought to win her a Nobel prize for land reclamation. I was game for any project of hers. I found myself out in the yard plucking handfuls of lichen from old firewood and looking around the yard for more. I became captivated by the beauty of the lichen itself, so I brought out the camera and took some shots. The artistic possibilities were endless.

People often talk about “the arts” and “arts education” as if they were separate from real life, as if they were an afterthought: a bonus, perhaps, but not essential. I think we forget that art is everywhere, that beauty is inextricable from life, that nature is showing us her finery and inviting us to create something exquisite in response.

Singing back to the birds, spinning yarn from the sheep’s wool, telling stories by the fire: these are arts as old as human civilization. They are what bring us together and change us from lonely individuals into lively communities.

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Welcome!

Hi! I'm Carolyn, an actress, mom, wife, and dabbler in all things artistic. Glad to have you with me on a journey of discovery. I'm blogging about art, life, and how each one changes the other. I invite you to follow along.